National Instruments reviews

- The company is a very standard company-- the office culture is very Office Space. - The physical office is horrible. They've taken some steps to address it lately (remodeling the cafeteria, for example) and the grounds are generally pretty nice, but the cubicles have definitely been there longer than I've been alive. - Regular layoffs despite advertising as a company that does not do layoffs. While recruiting, they say a lot about how well they handled the 2008 recession and how they've been on the "Best Places to Work" list many times, omitting that neither of those apply to their practices over the last few years. The layoffs are also usually followed by a round of hires overseas. While I enjoy working with all my colleagues across the world, I have been told point-blank by management that the reason we hire internationally so much is that "foreign employees are cheaper." - Compensation is regularly below industry standard. Internally it's one of the most common complaints, and kind of accepted as the trade-off for the flexibility in your schedule. Some years, my raises didn't even cover inflation. The "lack of budget" also manifests in lack of formal training. Instead, you learn new skills through trial-by-fire. - Constant org redesigns. In the entire time I've been here, I have not once felt stable/secure in my role. - C-suite seems very disconnected from day-to-day operations. It's not uncommon for us to get mandates for new ways of operating <1 month before we're expected to make the change. - IT in particular is a disaster-- all of the solutions are propped up with match sticks, tooth picks, and duct tape. Leadership doesn't consider IT a priority, even though almost 100% of daily operations rely on it, leading to frustration across the board about lack of IT bandwidth and IT's inability to build/fix the solutions needed for the "quick change of direction" mentioned above. - THERE ARE VIRTUALLY NO BLACK PEOPLE. There are plenty of people from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds... except Black. In the entire time I've been at the company, I've met exactly one Black person that wasn't either custodial staff or security. The CEO pays a lot of lip service to BLM, but I've seen no reforms whatsoever to our hiring practices. Oh, and the Diversity & Inclusion lead is white. - Rampant sexism. Although there are plenty of women employed, almost all of leadership is older, white men. There's no real path for addressing sexism in the office; I certainly wouldn't feel safe reporting sexism even if it was making me miserable. - The benefits keep getting worse. Once upon a time, in the distant past, the benefits were so good that "you could have a baby for $50," as said by my long-timer colleague. Now, every year they increase the cost of benefits over pace of inflation, switch to cheaper providers, and then email-blast us with slide shows about how their benefits package is "competitive" and, bafflingly, how we should be using our healthcare as little as possible (???) to keep costs down for the company (?????????). - Annual bonuses are tied to company performance... and the company doesn't do well. In the years that we have had bonuses, they were a laughable amount. I'm talking, like, $200 for employees with salaries upwards of $80k. Unless, of course, you're in senior leadership. Anyone with a job title of "Director" or higher gets an ACTUAL annual bonus,-- regardless of company performance-- while simultaneously nodding sympathetically at the concerns of us peons about our pitiful salaries. I'm not even a disgruntled employee. I'm fairly comfortable with my role in the company, but this is a pretty exhaustive list of the sorts of things you're expected to tolerate for the flexibility you get. If you value that flexibility pretty highly (as I do), this may be a perfectly suitable place to work. If you value any of the things in my cons list... I would urge you to reconsider working here.

The technical interview for this position was easier than my first semester intro to programming class, and not reflective of the position. It seems the criteria used is for what the job entailed six years ago and is no longer good. They do not care about giving me the training I need to accomplish the tasks they assign me. The company is big on "ownership", but is terrible on following through. I am told constantly to fix issues that I come across in my work, and that it is what is expected of me as a technician if I want to get good reviews and advance. But the cause of most of these issues are the owners (engineers who have been promoted during their stay at the company) not following through on their ownership responsibilities. Hypocritical. Additionally, I usually lack the knowledge needed to fix those issues due to lack or training. If NI doesn't want to give new hires the necessary training, then they need to update their hiring criteria. Hardware, which is required for most of these tasks, is scarce. Supposedly, this is from other groups poaching from us so they don't have to use their budget code for hardware. So, eventually someone scrounges up some pre-production version that will only be for some of the testing you need to do, and you have to make do with that. Documentation is terrible. There are at least three different intranets that I know of where we document and no one updates any of it, so knowledge here remains tribal. You have to try and hunt down the people who know what it is that you need to know, and all of them are very busy.